The Guardian’s pollster has the Lib Dems going up five points The monthly ICM survey for the Guardian which has been going continuously for nearly a quarter of a century records a sharp jump for the Lib Dems and shows that the Labour deficit would be bigger if Gordon Brown was leader. The main vote shares are with changes on December – CON 37% (-3): LAB 31% (-1): LD 23% (+5). When the second question was asked – how would…
Brief preface – I am a Labour MP who prefers to post occasionally and anonymously, as it gives me the opportunity to be more outspoken than Nick Palmer, Stewart Jackson and others can be. First the leadership election. Everyone in the PLP now agrees that it’ll be Gordon unless he falls under a bus. Consequently, people aren’t as interested as they used to be in whether there will be a contest or not. The best outcome for him would be…
Honours probe developments cause punters to re-consider The latest betting on the Blair departure date has Q2 at 1.14/1 and Q3 at 1.28/1 with everything, it seems, now dependent on the honours probe. After all the talk of him leaving in early July the developments on Friday have caused some reconsideration. But this one remains very hard to call because nobody knows how the Yates inquiry is likely to pan out or what the PM’s reaction to it will be….
John Reid backers make the most in the new spread-betting market My first experience of the new IG Index weekly spread betting market on how twelve leading politicians would rate over the week in YouGov’s BrandIndex surveys has proved to be a costly one. I had thought that David Cameron was having a bad week with all the news of UKIP defections, a poor showing for the party in a Yorkshire poll and a couple of Tory donors getting very…
Could bad polls this week affect the Blair departure date? If ICM and Communicate Research are following their normal schedules then the fieldwork for their January surveys will have been taking place this weekend – just as the war of words between some senior Labour figures and the police reached a new height. So we will only have to wait a couple of days to find out whether what appeared to be a concerted strategy to rubbish the police is…
Is it now just between her and Obama? Just five days after the black senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, announced that he was taking the first formal steps to run for the presidency in 2006 Hillary Rodham Clinton has this afternoon made the same move. This is how the Betfair betting exchange prices look for the Democratic nomination: The big question for punters is whether any of the other candidates has a chance against the two high profile front runners?…
So what’s happening with the Unitary Authorities? The Unitary Authorities were a creation of John Major’s government. They have similar powers to London Boroughs. They combine the functions of County and District councils, in single-tier authorities. There are 46 of them in England, of which 45 will hold elections in May. 25 will hold all-out elections, and 20 will elect by thirds. Most of the seats coming up were last contested in 2003, with some in 2004. In 2003, the…
UPDATED..UPDATED..UPDATED..UPDATED..UPDATED..UPDATED.. But is a Mori lead good news for Brown-Blair? There’s the monthly Ipsos-Mori poll out in the Sun this morning but the only reference to it appears to be in the above extract reproduced from the online editorial page. At the time of writing there does not seem to be a story with the figures. What we have suggests that the main voting figures put Labour ahead. This article will be updated when the full information is available. For…